I became obsessed, and as I researched more, I began to find the most wonderful things. Napster was – briefly – an enormously popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service.
There had been heavy coverage of the MP3 phenomenon and of Apple, Napster and the Pirate Bay, but there had been little talk of the inventors and almost none at all of those who actually pirated the files. The only hard part was figuring out what to listen to.Īs I was browsing through my enormous list of albums one day a few years ago, a fundamental question struck me: where had all this music come from, anyway? I didn’t know the answer, and as I researched it, I realised that no one else did either. But for me, and those younger, collecting was effortless, the music was simply there. Record collecting had been a subculture, too, and, for that vanishing breed, finding albums proved to be an exhilarating challenge, one that involved scouring garage sales, sifting through bargain bins. This was true even for those who loved music – in fact, it was especially true for them. My older friends regarded piracy with scepticism and sometimes outright hostility. Had I been just a couple of years older, I doubt I would have become so involved. I was at the very forefront of the digital download trend. It wasn’t just a way to get the music – it was its own subculture. But that was the perverse lure of the piracy underground. This was not a conscious impulse and, had you suggested it to me, I would have denied it. What was really driving me? Now, years later, I can see that what I really wanted was to belong to an elite and rarefied group. I actually hated Abba, and although I owned four ZZ Top albums, I couldn’t tell you the name of one.
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